When a web-based document is displayed, the display appearance is known as the “look & feel” (alternatively “look and feel”) of the document. The display appearance of the document is imparted by the style information of or pertaining to the document. Style information is also known as presentation semantics. Style information usually includes layout (i.e. placement of objects on a page), fonts, and color information. Style information may also include text alignment, sizes, borders, and spacing. A well-known technique for representing style information makes use of documents written in a markup language. A document written in a markup language can have style information inline in the document, or can reference one or more CSS (cascading style sheets) files that contain style information. CSS is a stylesheet language, used to style webpages. Commonly used markup languages include HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and EML (a language for email or .eml files). EML adheres to the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) standard. The MIME standard is useful in communication protocols such as HTTP (Hypertext Terminal Protocol), which requires data be transmitted in email-like messages. A document sent to a computing device of a user, using HTTP, can then be displayed on a display screen of the computing device, with the display appearance of the document controlled by the presentation semantics.
Server-based archiving systems store large numbers of documents from various origins and require a large amount of storage memory. In order to conserve storage memory space, many archiving systems store archival versions of documents with style information removed. An archival version of a document with style information removed is text-only, or may be text with a small amount of formatting such as font type and font size information. Archiving systems may store archival versions of documents with or without images included. Storage of archival versions of documents, with style information removed, is useful for search and retrieval purposes. However, the display appearance of a document is lost when the style information is removed. That is, when displaying an archived version of a document with style information removed, the display appearance is more basic, primitive or plain and does not match the display appearance of the original document (which was displayed using style information).
Therefore, there is a need in the art for an archiving solution which overcomes the drawbacks described above.